


The Morgenstern Affair

by baroque_mongoose



Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-13
Updated: 2014-11-13
Packaged: 2018-02-25 06:03:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2611100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baroque_mongoose/pseuds/baroque_mongoose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why did British Intelligence blame one of their best agents for a set of circumstances which they knew were not his fault and he could not have prevented?  Mr Wooster, the agent in question, never wasted any time sitting around resenting them for it.</p>
<p>Instead, he worked it out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Morgenstern Affair

Heinrich Morgenstern had not expected to find Baron Gilgamesh Wulfenbach playing chess with the British Ambassador; it gave him something of a shock. He had certainly heard that the two men were on very good terms, but, nonetheless, he had not been expecting to trip over the Ambassador, as it were, the first time he went to pay his respects to the Baron. He hesitated for a moment in the doorway.

“Well, come in, Morgenstern,” said the Baron. “Don't stand on ceremony.” He shot a curious look at the Ambassador, who, to all intents and purposes, appeared to be totally absorbed in the contemplation of his next move; then he looked up at Morgenstern again. “I'm not as formal as my father was. Come and have a seat. Do you know the British Ambassador? Sir Ardsley Wooster. Ardsley, this is Heinrich Morgenstern.”

The Ambassador looked up from the board and grinned. “Really, Gil?”

Morgenstern stared at him. So did Gil for a moment or two, before the corners of his mouth started to twitch upwards.

“All right, Ardsley,” he said. “You clever... no, I won't say it. I'm trying to ease off on the swearing. Boris says it's undiplomatic, and I'm sure he's right. Since Herr Morgenstern is now officially retired, and it therefore no longer matters, you may as well show off a bit. Tell me what you know about him.”

Sir Ardsley beamed at Morgenstern; he was not by nature a vindictive character, but he would not have been quite human if he had not been thoroughly enjoying Morgenstern's discomfiture at this moment. “I'm glad we have now met at last and I can put a face to the name,” he said. “Well, well.”

“It may not matter over here,” said Morgenstern rapidly, in perfect unaccented English. “It will, as you're very well aware, matter a great deal in England.”

Sir Ardsley shrugged. “Not in English, please, Herr Morgenstern. Gil understands it perfectly well, but he has to think about it occasionally.”

“Are you going to have me extradited?” Morgenstern demanded, in rising agitation. “Because...”

“Perish the thought,” replied Sir Ardsley. “You're retired and safe home. The one thing I didn't know about you was exactly whose agent you were, but now I know you're Gil's, it all makes perfect sense.” He smiled in his friend's direction. “And I wouldn't want to annoy Gil. The damage you did is done and can't be undone.”

“How the... er, how on earth did you know who he was?” asked Gil. “You said yourself you hadn't met him in person. My father had infiltrated him so high up in British Intelligence that you, as a field agent, never would get to meet him.”

“Indeed,” said Sir Ardsley. “And, fortunately for me, it took him a long time to work up to a level where he could directly affect the section I was in. Your father was brilliant, but the information he had was not perfect, and he could work only on the basis of what he had. Consequently, he infiltrated Herr Morgenstern... or, as I should perhaps call him, Henry Morrison... into the wrong part of the Service, and, once he was established, he could not move across, but only up.” He paused, and smiled at Morgenstern. “Which you did, very creditably. You were a good agent.”

Morgenstern stared at him. “Well. You're very... sporting about it all, considering what I did to you. Which I'm sure you know all about, given everything else.”

Sir Ardsley nodded. “Oh, yes. Naturally. Your mission was to neutralise me, and you did that with stunning success for over two years. When the Lady Heterodyne disappeared and the uprisings began, you had reached a position where you could start to throw your weight around with respect to my section, and so you ensured that I took the full blame for everything that had gone wrong. You didn't dare try to get me thrown out of the Service, since my immediate boss at that time was very much on my side, and she was very experienced and well respected. But you did get me posted to the caves outside Mechanicsburg, to keep an eye on what was, as you well knew, a static situation.”

“Until Lady Heterodyne reappeared,” Morgenstern grumbled.

“Indeed. And when that finally happened, you could no longer stop me, since in helping to escort her to England I was carrying out the requirements of not only the Service, but also your real employer...” - he nodded at Gil - “...and the Lady Heterodyne herself.”

“Yes, and you did a fine job,” said Gil, “but how did you know about Morgenstern?”

“I didn't at the time,” replied Sir Ardsley, moving a rook. “But I was in those caves for a long time, and, although the Jägers were excellent and remarkably calming company, I was bored. And when I am bored, I do a great deal of thinking. Naturally, one of the things I thought about very often was why I had been blamed for a situation which was not my fault, and which I could not have prevented. I was not resentful so much as curious. I had expected a telling off in the heat of the moment; things had gone very badly wrong, I was in the middle of them, and therefore I was the obvious target for someone's displeasure. But this was not that kind of thing at all. This was calculated.”

Gil raised an eyebrow. “So that was when you began to think your Service had been infiltrated?”

“Certainly it was. But, of course, at that point I had no means of investigating that theory. Mrs Chadwick, my boss, retired from the Service at some point while I was in the caves, and was replaced by a Miss Denby, whom I believe you know, Herr Morgenstern. Mrs Chadwick, I think, might have been prepared to keep her eyes open for me if I had shared my suspicions with her; Miss Denby I knew nothing about, and therefore could not trust. So I had to wait. I can, however, be very patient.”

Gil thought for a moment, then moved his queen. “Check. It's a fine thing when you can't trust your own boss.”

Sir Ardsley sighed. “I suspect it is the nature of intelligence services all over the world. Could you trust yours, Herr Morgenstern?”

“I couldn't possibly answer that,” said Morgenstern, still very flustered.

“No, I suppose not. Unfair question. Forgive me.” Sir Ardsley peered at the board. “Oh, very clever, Gil! If I interpose the knight, you have mate in five. Therefore... I will not.”

“Hmpf. Should have known you wouldn't fall for that one,” said Gil. “Even so, I think it'll be a little puzzle for you to work out how you should play. It's not at all obvious.”

“No, indeed,” replied Sir Ardsley equably. “You will, of course, win eventually, but I am happy to be able to give you a good game.”

“Oh, you certainly do that. Do you ever play against Boris?”

“Frequently. We are terrifyingly competitive. We keep a record. I am only just ahead of him, and that is over about a hundred and fifty games so far.”

“That sounds like an interesting spectator sport,” Gil mused. “Anyway, so how did you unmask our friend here in the end?”

Sir Ardsley gazed keenly at the board. “Well, once I became Ambassador, of course I had access to my old Service records. There were no names, of course, just notes of any decisions affecting me; however, there were dates with them, and the Service also keeps records of internal meetings. They are not minuted in the normal way, or, if they are, I do not have access to those minutes even now. However, I can access the basic information – that is to say, the date of the meeting and who was present. And that was when I first ran across the name of Henry Morrison.”

“You can't have proved anything from that,” said Morgenstern, frowning.

“Of course not. No; once I had a suspect, I had to go digging deeper. So I investigated you.” He grinned, and moved one of his bishops.

“Congratulations,” said Gil.

“On working out whom to investigate, or on selecting the correct move?” asked Sir Ardsley.

“Both,” said Gil.

“You... investigated me... how?” asked Morgenstern.

“Oh, not anyone in the Service.” Sir Ardsley was clearly enjoying himself. “Good heavens, no. You would have worked them out straight away. No, I have my own agent; and since we're all being honest here, I'll even tell you his name, or at least the one he was working under. It may not, of course, be his real name,” he added innocently. “Matthew Forrest. I don't imagine it rings any bells.”

“It doesn't,” said Morgenstern.

Gil moved a pawn. Sir Ardsley moved his rook again. Both moves were, effectively, forced.

“No, I thought not. But he is very good, and of course I taught him a few of my own tricks, too. He couldn't discover who you were working for, but he did find out it wasn't British Intelligence. He brought me a sheet of your notes, written in a code that definitely was not one of ours. We had a great deal of fun cracking it between us. I like Forrest. He's rougher than a Jäger, but he has a mind like a knife.” He grinned. “Now, of course, if I were one of those flashy spies of the kind that appear occasionally in stage plays, I would at this point casually produce that piece of notepaper from my waistcoat pocket. But since I'm not, I can't; however, I can tell you it was what cooked your goose. I had Forrest try to intercept your letters to find out who you were writing to, but you were, as I previously said, very good. How exactly were you writing to Gil?”

Morgenstern sighed. “Oh, all right. I had a maid. The maid had a beau in another town who happened to be a tradesman. The maid wrote to the beau regularly. My notes to the Baron went inside the billets-doux, and the beau wrapped them up in the packages of fine English tea that the Baron ordered from him. That gives nothing away, since he ordered from several suppliers.”

“Ingenious,” said Sir Ardsley. “Check, Gil.”

Gil had the grace to look a little embarrassed. Then he looked at the board. “Sweet lightning,” he said.

Sir Ardsley raised an eyebrow. “Does Boris consider that to be swearing?”

“I don't believe so,” said Gil. “Ardsley, I think you're going to win this one.”

“Really? Oh, surely not.”

“Well, you do occasionally,” said Gil.

“All right,” said Morgenstern. “You worked out that someone called Henry Morrison was an infiltrator. Well done. But when I walked in here and the Baron greeted me, how did you know I was the same person? Granted, the name's not dissimilar, but even so, that could have been a mere coincidence.”

“Because the code you used was based on the two English words 'morning star', of course,” Sir Ardsley explained patiently. “I did tell you Forrest and I had cracked your code. And 'morning star' in German is, of course, Morgenstern. Factor that in along with the similarity between the names, and you could hardly have been anyone else.”

“So you were behind all that,” said Morgenstern. “You were the one who engineered that little... reorganisation, shall we say... within the Service so that I had no real choice but to take early retirement.”

“Well, really,” said Sir Ardsley. “It was that or have you exposed as an infiltrator, and if that had happened, you'd have hung for it. You know that as well as I do. Fair is fair. You didn't get me killed; you just neutralised me. So I neutralised you in turn.” He smiled.

“You've got mate in nine, Ardsley, though I'm not sure you realise it,” said Gil. He knocked over his king. “Well done. That was the best game you've ever played against me.”

Morgenstern gave them both a wry look.

“I think I beg to differ, gentlemen,” he said.


End file.
